Disillusion across the Rhine

After a bright start, some bumpiness emerges in a close bilateral relationship

CHARLES DE GAULLE once likened France and Germany to “exhausted and wavering wrestlers who rest against each other”. Rest made possible the partnership that became the driving force behind the European project. Fifty years on the memory of war's horror is fading, and the partners feel perky. The German economy under Chancellor Angela Merkel is growing at its fastest pace since 2000. Nobody could possibly say that France's new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is exhausted and wavering (this week, he took the opportunity of a holiday in New Hampshire to release a statement and a French tirade at two American photographers, before meeting the American president).

France and Germany are starting to chafe against each other again. The latest example is the spat over France's dealings with Libya. After months of negotiation by the European Union to free six Bulgarian medical staff who were sentenced to death for infecting Libyan children with HIV, Mr Sarkozy's wife, Cécilia, swooped in to take the freed inmates to Bulgaria and the credit for their release home to France. Worse, Mr Sarkozy agreed, without telling Germany, to sell a nuclear power plant and weapons to Libya.

This comes after other provocations. Mr Sarkozy has repeatedly questioned the tenets of Europe's single currency, especially its strictures on budget deficits and on the independence of the European Central Bank (ECB). “Germans are getting increasingly fed up with the French style,” says Daniela Schwarzer of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, a think-tank.

This is hardly a crisis. On the issue that matters most to Germany, the future of the EU, Mr Sarkozy is playing ball. In 2005 French and Dutch voters rejected the draft EU constitution. Mr Sarkozy came to office vowing to push through a new treaty that retains most of the substance of the rejected one. A deal to this effect was duly done at an EU summit chaired by Ms Merkel in June. Better still, Mr Sarkozy, like most other national leaders, will submit the result for ratification to parliament, not voters (see article). This is a great comfort to Germany. “On core issues we've had a very good start with Sarkozy,” says a senior German diplomat.

Yet on other matters, especially the euro and foreign policy, Mr Sarkozy has been more troubling to his partners. During his campaign he pandered to the 95% of Frenchmen who believe that the single currency has raised prices (“the kidnapping of the euro has to stop,” he pleaded). Since taking office in May he has floated various ideas for prying it loose from the control of the ECB, whose job is to maintain its value. Perhaps the EU should have an economic government, he mused. His Europe minister hinted that the ECB's independence should be curbed. In an unprecedented presidential visit to a meeting of EU finance ministers in July, Mr Sarkozy asked for extra time to cut France's budget deficit, which it had originally promised to eliminate by 2010.

Mr Sarkozy's flirtation with Libya is part of a France-first stance that sits ill with the very notion of a common EU foreign policy. He also champions a “Mediterranean Union”, consisting of eight southern European countries and ten North African and Middle Eastern ones (including Libya), which would have its own EU-style council of governments. “This would be like Mercosur,” a South American customs union, suggests Jean-Louis Guigou, a long-time champion of the scheme. The idea is to counter migration pressure through economic development. But it threatens to undermine the “Barcelona process”, the current European framework for the region, which Mr Sarkozy has already pronounced a failure.

The change in atmosphere is partly due to a change in style. Mr Sarkozy, like Ms Merkel, belongs to a generation that takes peace for granted. It is hard to imagine any previous post-war president remarking, as Mr Sarkozy did on the campaign trail, that France “did not invent the final solution”. Both leaders are more pro-American than their predecessors, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, who were drawn together by a hostility to American unilateralism in general and the Iraq war in particular. But Ms Merkel is a cautious consensus builder who, like a film producer, is content to let others share the limelight, whereas Mr Sarkozy likes to be director, scriptwriter and leading man. Such a relationship can work, but only if the star does not try to steal the whole show.

There are reasons for thinking that Franco-German tensions will outlast whatever chemistry affects Mr Sarkozy and Ms Merkel. The first is differences in their economies. Germany has pushed down labour costs, outsourced production to other countries and sells more capital goods, which are much in demand in emerging economies like China. France has restructured less and depends more on price-sensitive consumer goods. As a result, “when the euro rises Germany makes money and France loses,” says Jean-Michel Six of Standard & Poor's, a rating agency. That reinforces the French preference for political intervention in both the economy and the currency.

The second is EU enlargement, which reduces the influence of the Franco-German duo and tempts each to pursue its own interests. It was under Mr Schröder that Germany began to subject EU initiatives to cost-benefit tests, which often produced a negative result. Yet mainstream German political parties remain pro-European and supportive of enlargement (if not as far as Turkey). That is less true of France. “France is probably the country that, through enlargement, had the strongest feeling of being marginalised,” says Ulrike Guérot of the newly established European Council on Foreign Relations.

Despite the strains, the Franco-German motor chugs on. All the two countries' ministers meet twice a year to discuss bilateral and, increasingly, European issues; the leaders meet every two months. The latest such encounter defused a potential dispute over who would manage EADS, an aerospace giant. No other bilateral relationship in Europe is sustained by such constant diplomacy. Tensions have often been productive: if this pairing agrees on something, the chances are high that the rest of Europe will go along. Even Mr Sarkozy's abrasiveness may serve the European cause. “He wants to rally the French to the idea of a limited European treaty, so he criticises the euro, as a populist move,” says Dominique Moïsi, a French foreign-policy pundit.

The risk is not of a sudden rupture but more of missed opportunities. Germany's allergy to economic tinkering squelches any discussion of measures the EU might take to correct the defects of a one-size-fits-all monetary policy, says Ms Schwarzer. On the other hand, Europe's fledgling foreign-policy initiatives on Iran and Iraq, to say nothing of its negotiations to admit Turkey as a full member, could be undermined by Mr Sarkozy's Mediterranean adventures. De Gaulle eventually reconciled nationalism with Europeanism. Today's leaders could find it harder.